


Paracosm

by Hyperius (Euregatto)



Category: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, But with more pining and feelings, F/M, First Kiss, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Repressed Memories, Rey Needs A Hug, Suggestive Themes, The Hand Touch Scene, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 11:58:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13294392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Hyperius
Summary: It occurs to him that she looks terrible. The edges of her features are cleaved through by the firelight. Her eyes are sunken, terrified; her hair melds with the wet pallet of her shirt to become continuous and dark.“Rey,” he says gently. The quiet is strange, amplifying and nursing off his voice, allowing it to ricochet across the barrier. “What happened?” An image is conjured in the front of his mind. Luke Skywalker. The emerald glaze of the lightsaber, colliding on arctic blue, is a harbinger of memories that leaves a sweltering pit in Ren's stomach. “Did he hurt you?”She looks at him as if surprised.





	Paracosm

**Author's Note:**

> A Reylo piece to get some writing practice in. Enjoy!
> 
> Edit 1/7: Wow, all this positive feedback really surprised me! I haven't smiled this much in a long time. You're the best!

  

  

A mouth formed by private ironies,  
As if he’d sat silent in too many meetings with people  
He thought more powerful and less intelligent than he.

from _Art and Life,_  by Robert Hass

 

  

 

*

 

 

 

 

There is a shadow that breaches her vision. She no longer recoils when the connection flays open and instead she focuses on it, on the waver in his eyes when he readily answers her beckon only to find an exoskeleton in place of his – friend? Mutual pining seems to have disrupted their boundaries. He isn’t sure what to call her, where they stand, how to approach it. He doesn’t have the heart to bring it up right now.

It occurs to him all the same that she looks terrible. The edges of her features are cleaved through by the same firelight that amiably illuminates the stone hovel. Her eyes are sunken, terrified; her hair melds with the wet pallet of her shirt to become continuous and dark. She’d be unrecognizable to even her friends. Yet her posture is intent and unyielding, braced for something he can’t put his finger on.

He doesn’t realize his breath is suspended. He’s accustomed to her prodding, their connections tearing open at unusual intervals and exposing him to her, to her questions and what she wants to know: Why is Master Skywalker so distant, did you know I ate roast Porghide for the first time, what do you think about – politicians, quantum astrophysics, blue milk. The balance. Tell me Ben, tell me everything.

But her lips, flushed at the edges, are pressed into a fine line and never move. That’s when he fully realizes something is amiss. Rivulets of water drip down her face. There’s a tremor in her shoulders. Between them, the narrow bridge of the Force lingers and the cold of wherever she resides – he can see the faint interior, rock and bur – brushes over him but he can’t feel it. She pulls her shawl closer, seeking warmth.

“Rey,” he says gently. The quiet is strange, amplifying and nursing off his voice, allowing it to ricochet across the barrier. “What happened?” An image is conjured in the front of his mind. Luke Skywalker. The emerald glaze of the lightsaber, colliding on arctic blue, a harbinger of memories that leaves a sweltering pit in Ren’s stomach. “Did he hurt you?”

She looks at him as if surprised by his front. “No.” And then, averting her eyes downwards in shame, she tells him, “I found a dark place. It wanted to show me something and I didn’t fight it.”

He waits. Her tears mingle with the swells of rainwater clinging, possessively, to her angelic features. The Force hums an ancient song about a black ravine and the way it knots its hands at the hip of her spirit. Darkness seeks intimacy with Rey and the haphazard pattern of the balance within her. For him, for a broken and isolated shell, it craves only bloodshed and the malevolent kinship of Snoke, digging his briery fingers into Ren’s shoulder and whispering, _Weakness is not in the nature of the Order._

“I wanted to see them. My parents. I wanted to…” She rubs the heels of her palms into her eyes and her breath is a strangled half-sob. Whatever this feeling is, it’s foreign but he feels it bone-deep. It reminds him though, as dismal as it is sudden, of arduous meetings with a forever peeved Hux, lips stitched shut in the presence of Snoke’s consultants, and Ren cannot properly breathe without risking a political genocide in the court room. It reminds him of that, of careful thought and collateral damage.

He seeks her out when the connection falters, as if, momentarily, she wanted to reject his presence, and he latches there, to the pulse of the veil. Then she recollects herself, barely noticing the slip.

“I’ve never felt so alone.” Her sadness is palpable, and right where it clots up under the cage of her chest, it sunders.

“You’re not alone.” He speaks honestly. He’s bad at lying and she looks up to him like she’s witnessing the expanse of a solar system. The convulsion of energy, the drift and pull of a collapsing star. Rebirth and recollection. Alignment. He looked at her the exact same way, before – when she carved his face into a sinuous sigil and felled him in the forest. Snow, over-churned between his fingers, the crooked stump he rests his head against while he ponders death and her moonlit beauty amongst other errant thoughts.

"Neither are you." She gestures. Holds out her hand, fingers slotted straight ahead. She’s particularly lovely, even in the deep throws of her despair when she manages to suck the air back into her chest and leaves him breathless. The emotional equivalent of gazing down a steep flight of stairs. A misstep waiting to happen.

He pulls off his gloves and reaches out to meet her with his adjacent hand. They‘re mere millimeters apart but it feels like miles, closing at the rate of galactic expansion until their fingertips are _touching_. The tension of the barrier rends into pieces and he thinks he can feel the swollen jaws of the cosmos slipping shut. Her gaze is intent, her smile widens, her relief is the sky.

They fall closer. Both her hands are on his, turning it over and over, tracing his lifeline with her forefinger as if he’s a map to a place beyond this galaxy, unseen by reality. He admires her face, the way the light seeps endlessly into her features, and the pull – there’s no gentleness to it, it is a desperation while the darkness is a patience.

“Rey,” he starts, but doesn’t include, _what are we doing?_

She grasps either side of his face firmly, with purpose, and her skin is equated to fire, searing her touch into his flesh. The _light_. This moment, this instance, their entwined lives little better than a cosmic blink and he allows it, once, only this once, he can’t afford more than this – to consume him and kisses her, feverish and desperate and they come apart at the seams. She presses back, lacking skill and instead embracing his lead, perhaps a bit too much teeth but he doesn’t mind.

The exhilaration is building, irking him, edging him. He wants to know if her skin tastes like clay or starlight, he wants to know if she’ll lace her fingers in his hair, he wants to know everything and he’s wanted to know everything since he first delved into her mind and saw the island at the horizon where the sea meets the sky, the isolation in the belly of an AT-AT, the blazing sand cascading over her shoulders as she shifts through wreckage for scraps.

His hands dig in her hips, drawing her close as if she’ll disappear when he lets go. Aspiration, devotion, need – they percolate through his veins as her fingers traverse the scar on his face, following the rabbit hole to his chest and his waist and his thighs, finding a hard, nervous pulse near the joint of his hip, splaying her hand there to feel it. She’s practically his undoing.

“That’s hardly fair,” he manages to pant out, and she presses her forehead to his. Her touch recedes from his leg and glides – her decisions are often premeditated and it shows – along the underside of his jaw, where she feels his aftershave, bristles and the faintest remainder of a cut.

“Yes, well, this whole situation isn’t very _fair_ —”

When they kiss again it’s a fire, consuming, slow and deliberate and agonizing. Her hands tug suggestively at his belt, undoing it, and they’ve both forgotten about her point. He’s leaning into her until she’s pinned beneath him against her bed roll. She’s pulling him with her like the gravitational force of a planet. They collide, breathless and voiceless and caught in the juncture of time the Force has allotted them. 

Her hands combing through his kempt obsidian hair, she’s losing herself. “Maker above, Ben, I _need_ —”

“Tell me what you want,” he mumbles against her lips, his hand riding up under her shirt to find the damp expanse of her abdomen, her thrumming pulse. She tenses, pressing up to feel him moving. “Tell me, I’ll give you anything – _everything_.”

“Ben, I—”

She means to say more, to mean more by it but the Force falls out beneath them. Luke Skywalker appears in the doorway, his voice is a thunder clap, a primal roar and something in Ren – something sedated, repressed, guilty – is quick to reject the connection and he slams back into his reality, into his bedroom, stumbling over his chair and away from his desk. There’s a moment where he isn’t certain he’s made it back at all.

His uncle’s terrifying, inhuman expression; it relocates to the front of Ren’s mind, plastering against the back of his eyelids so it’s all he sees, even when he closes his eyes and curls against the wall and desperately _waits_. Waits, for the tremors to ease, waits for the anger to deplete and for the aphotic memories that linger just outside the fringes of his dreams to latch onto his sanity.

He waits for Rey to call him back home.

  

  


End file.
